Friday, March 28, 2014

NOW SHOWING AT A BLOG NEAR YOU: NOAH

It’s probably no big shock that I reviewed Darren Aronofsky’s Noah for Aleteia this week. I mean, how often are you going to get the chance these days to review a $125,000,000 biblical epic helmed by an Academy Award nominated director? The choice was a no-brainer.

Paramount, hoping to earn back its huge investment from the same crowd that flocked to see Son of God, has been relentlessly hyping the movie to preachers and churches. Unfortunately, that’s probably going to backfire because anybody who goes into Noah expecting to see a straight ahead adaptation of the story from the Bible is due for some serious shocks. Just ask poor Barbara Nicolosi over at Church of the Masses, she’ll tell you.

Of course, the flip side to Mrs. Nicolosi’s reaction are those who’ve invested quite a lot of time into the movie prior to its release. Peter Chattaway’s Film Chat blog, for one example, has pretty much been all Noah, all the time for a few weeks (if not months) now. I wonder if he’s having buyer’s remorse yet.

As for me, I’m sort of in the middle. As a biblical adaptation, Noah is certainly an utter failure, but as a weird little sci-fi flick with religious undertones, it’s not that bad really. And it’s not like everything in it is a complete fabrication. Even the ridiculous twelve foot tall multi-armed rock monsters have some basis in scripture, as Daniel McInerny points out over at Aleteia. Still, if you don’t want to spend any money on Noah out of principle, feel free to wait until it shows up on the SyFy channel as that’s where it’s undoubtedly headed.

I guess it all just goes to show that if you’re going to play around with the story of Noah, you should just stick to comedy. That approach worked for Cosby, after all.